In geography, the antipode () of any spot on Earth is the point on Earth's surface diametrically opposite to it. A pair of points antipodal () to each other are situated such that a straight line connecting the two would pass through Earth's center. Antipodal points are as far away from each other as possible. The North and South Poles are antipodes of each other.
In the Northern Hemisphere, "the Antipodes" may refer to Australia and New Zealand, and Antipodeans to their inhabitants. Geographically, the antipodes of the British Isles are in the Pacific Ocean, south of New Zealand. This gave rise to the name of the Antipodes Islands of New Zealand, which are close to the antipode of London. The antipodes of Australia are in the North Atlantic Ocean, while parts of Spain, Portugal, France and Morocco are antipodal to New Zealand.
Approximately 15% of land territory is antipodal to other land, representing approximately 4.4% of Earth's surface. Another source estimates that about 3% of Earth's surface is antipodal land. The largest antipodal land masses are the Malay Archipelago, antipodal to the Amazon basin and adjoining Andean ranges; east China and Mongolia, and small sections of southeast Russia, antipodal to Argentina and Chile; and Greenland and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, antipodal to East Antarctica. There is a general paucity of antipodal land because the Southern Hemisphere has comparatively less land than the Northern Hemisphere and, of that, the antipodes of Australia are in the North Atlantic Ocean, while the antipodes of southern Africa are in the North Pacific Ocean.
Geography Since the antipode of any place on the Earth is the place that is diametrically opposite of it, a line drawn from one to the other will pass through the centre of Earth and form a true diameter. For example, the antipodes of most of New Zealand's North Island lie in Spain. Most of the Earth's land surfaces have ocean at their antipodes; this is a natural consequence of most of the Earth's surface being covered in water.
The antipode of any place on Earth is distant from it by 180° of longitude and as many degrees to the north of the Equator as the original is to the south (or vice versa); in other words, the latitudes are numerically equal, but one is north and the other south. The maps shown here are based on this relationship; they show a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection of the Earth, in yellow, overlaid on which is another map, in blue, shifted horizontally by 180° of longitude and inverted about the Equator with respect to latitude.
Solar noon (i.e. the time at which the sun is highest) at one place is solar midnight at the other, the winter solstice at one place is the summer solstice at the other, and the spring equinox at one place is the autumn equinox at the other. Sunrise and sunset do not quite oppose each other at antipodes due to refraction of sunlight.
Mathematical description
If the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of a point on the Earth's surface are (φ, θ), then the coordinates of the antipodal point are (−φ, θ ± 180°). This relation holds true whether the Earth is approximated as a perfect sphere or as a reference ellipsoid.
In terms of the usual way these geographic coordinates are given, this transformation can be expressed symbolically as
x° N/S y° E/W ↦ x° S/N (180 − y)° W/E,
that is, for the latitude (the north–south coordinate) the magnitude of the angle remains the same but N is changed to S and vice versa, and for the longitude (the East/West coordinate) the angle is replaced by its supplementary angle while E is exchanged for W. For example, the antipode of the point in China at (a few hundred kilometres from Beijing) is the point in Argentina at (a few hundred kilometres from Buenos Aires).
Etymology The word antipodes comes from the Greek: ἀντίποδες (antípodes),ἀντίποδες, Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus plural of ἀντίπους (antipous), "with feet opposite (ours)",ἀντίπους Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus from ἀντί (antí, "opposite") + πούς (poús, "foot"). It is closely related to the word antipodas, meaning "opposite" or "the region opposite", which has the same etymology.Sotirios Tsioris, Frances Illingworth, et.al., Collins Greek-English dictionary, Glasgow, HarperCollins, 2006, p.62. Diogenes Laertius says: “he was the first name the Antipodas in philosophy”.“Καὶ πρῶτος ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ ἀντίποδας ὠνόμασε”; Diogenis Laertii de Vitis… Philosophorum, Gotthard, Püttner, 1739, Liber III, Plato, n.19, 63a, p.307. The Greek word "antipous (ἀντίπους)" is attested in Plato's dialogue Timaeus, already referring to a spherical Earth, explaining the relativity of the terms "above" and "below": The term is taken up by Aristotle (De caelo 308a.20), Strabo (Geographica 1.1.13), Plutarch (On the Malice of Herodotus 37) and Diogenes Laërtius (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers book 3).
Eratosthenes of Cyrene (circa. 276–194 BC), the head of the Library of Alexandria, says in the poem Hermes that the Earth was girt around by five encircling zones, of which the two temperate, separated by the equatorial torrid, were where dwelt ‘the Antipodes men’"ἐν δέ μιν ἄνδρες ἀντίποδες ναίουσι"; Ernestus Maas, Commentariorum in Aratum, Berlin, Weidmann, 1898, pp.63-64. English translation by James S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992, p.128.. The term was adopted into Latin as antipodes. The Latin word changed its sense from the original "under the feet, opposite side" to "those with the feet opposite", i.e. a bahuvrihi referring to hypothetical people living on the opposite side of the Earth. Medieval illustrations imagine them in some way "inverted", with their feet growing out of their heads, pointing upward.
In this sense, Antipodes first entered English in 1398 in a translation of the 13th century De Proprietatibus Rerum by Bartholomeus Anglicus, translated by John of Trevisa: (In Modern English: Yonder in Ethiopia are the Antipodes, men that have their feet against our feet.)
The modern English singular antipode arose in the 16th or 17th century as a back-formation from antipodes; antipous or the Latinate antipus would have been closer to the original singular. Most dictionaries suggest a pronunciation of for this form.
Historical significance Both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have been inhabited for most of human history. Humans first appeared in Eastern Africa around years ago and had spread throughout Africa, Eurasia, and Australia by to years ago. In spite of this, the presence of land in the Southern Hemisphere and the possibility of humans living there was a matter of debate among Mediterranean and European peoples from the ancient era until the Age of Exploration.
Herodotus said that Pharaoh Necho II of the 26th Dynasty (610–595 BC) commissioned an expedition of Phoenicians which in three years sailed from the Red Sea around Africa back to the mouth of the Nile, and that "as they sailed on a westerly course round the southern end of Libya (Africa), they had the sun on their right"— to northward of them, proving that they had been in the Southern Hemisphere.Herodotus, The Histories 4.42.
Pomponius Mela, the first Roman geographer, asserted that the Earth had two habitable zones, a North and South one, but that it would be impossible to get into contact with each other because of the unbearable heat at the Equator (De orbis situ 1.4). Fifth-century Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo was skeptical of the notion. Augustine asserted that "it is too absurd to say that some men might have set sail from this side and, traversing the immense expanse of ocean, have propagated there a race of human beings descended from that one first man."De Civitate Dei, Book XVI, Chapter 9 — Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes, translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College
In the Early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville's widely read encyclopedia presented the term "antipodes" or, as he said "antipodas" as referring to antichthones (people who lived on the opposite side of the Earth), as well as to a geographical place:
In using the form antipodas rather than the more usual Latin antipodes Isidore simply transcribed the original Greek αντίποδας, the singular case of the name: the plural case is αντίποδες (antipodes), used in converting the name into Latin. These people came to play a role in medieval discussions about the shape of the Earth.; Robert J. King, "The Antipodes on Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 World Map", The Globe, no.91, 2022, pp. 43–60.
In 748, in reply to a letter from Boniface, Pope Zachary declared the belief "that beneath the earth there was another world and other men, another sun and moon" to be heretical. In his letter, Boniface had apparently maintained that Vergilius of Salzburg held such a belief.
MGH, Epistolae Selectae, 1, 80, pp. 178–9 ; translation in M. L. W. Laistner, Thought and Letters in Western Europe, pp. 184–5.; see also Jaffe, Biblioth. rerum germ., III, 191
The author of the Norwegian book Konungs Skuggsjá, from around 1250, discusses the existence of antipodes. He notes that (if they exist) they will see the sun in the north in the middle of the day and that they will have seasons opposite those of the Northern Hemisphere.
The earliest surviving account by a European who had visited the Southern Hemisphere is that of Marco Polo (who, on his way home in 1292, sailed south of the Malay Peninsula). He noted that it was impossible to see the star Polaris from there.
The antipodes being an attribute of a spherical Earth, the Christian Roman author Lactantius used their perceived absurdity as an argument for a flat Earth. However, knowledge of the spherical Earth was widespread in Europe by the Middle Ages, only occasionally disputed—the medieval dispute surrounding the antipodes mainly concerned the question whether people could live on the opposite side of the Earth: since the torrid clime was considered impassable, it would have been impossible to evangelize them. This posed the problem that Christ told the apostles to evangelize all mankind; with regard to the unreachable antipodes, this would have been impossible. Christ would either have appeared a second time, in the antipodes, or left the damned irredeemable. Such an argument was forwarded by the Spanish theologian Alonso Tostado as late as the 15th century and "St. Augustine doubts" was a response to Columbus's proposal to sail westwards to the Indies.The land reached by Columbus in 1492 was identified as that of the Antipodes by the diplomatist Peter Martyr who, in a letter he wrote from Barcelona dated 14 May 1493, said: "A few days since, a certain Christopher Columbus, a Ligurian, returned from the Western Antipodes"."Poft paucos inde dies rediit ab antipodibus occiduis Chriftophorus quidam Colonus vir Ligur"; P. Martire ad Io. Borromeo, pridie id.Maii mccccxciii, in Pietro Martire d' Anghiera, Opus epistolarum Petri Martyris Anglerii Mediolanensis, Aedibus Michaelis de Eguia, 1530, lib.VI, f.xxxiv. Perhaps influenced by this, Fernão Vaz Dourado in his Atlas of 1571 inscribed over the map of Mexico and adjacent parts of America, Tera Antipodum regis Castelle inventa a Xforo Columbo Januensi (Land of the Antipodes, discovered for the King of Castile by Christopher Columbus of Genoa).Atlas de Fernão Vaz Dourado: reprodcão fidelissima do exemplar do Torre do Tombo, datado de Goa, 1571, Porto, Livraria Civilizacao, 1948, fol.18.